The government is way too chill about outdated technology
In 2016, nukes and floppy disks shouldn’t mix
While Facebook is making headlines with their attempts to develop artificial intelligence that can distinguish the highly subtle difference between a regular selfie and a selfie taken in a mirror, the Pentagon is making headlines for still using eight-inch floppy disks in the operation and control of nuclear weapons.
If the Pentagon were a millennial using a Macbook, it would respond to the prompt “Updates are ready for your computer” by selecting the “Remind me tomorrow” option—every day until system failure. Except that there’s a whole lot more riding on the Pentagon’s IT.
The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a May 26 report, titled Information Technologies: Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Legacy Systems, and an embarrassing lack of updates was unearthed. Most notably, a Strategic Automated Command and Control System used by the Department of Defense that “coordinates the operational functions of the United States’ nuclear forces, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers, and tanker support aircrafts. This system runs on an IBM Series/1 Computer — a 1970s computing system — and uses 8-inch floppy disks.”
Yes, your Xbox is more advanced than the tech controlling actual war games.
The report from GOA illuminated just how invested the government is in maintaining old systems, many of them obsolete, compared to investing in new systems and technology. The government has an $80 million annual budget for IT. Of that budget, from the 2015 fiscal year, 75 percent was designated for operation and management of outdated tech. And 5,233 of the approximately 7,000 IT investments from 2015 are using the entirety of their funds on upkeep. 2016 is looking even worse for development, modernization, and enhancement.
The time when the U.S. government paved the way for public technological advances, like utilizing computers before they were available for personal use, is long gone. Somehow our government got itself lodged in the past, clinging desperately to systems and hardware that have since become the equivalent of chiseling a wheel out of rock when there’s a store across the street selling steel-belted radials.
The Pentagon using eight-inch floppy disks for some of its nuclear operations is just the latest instance in a series of puzzling and rather disappointing uses of outdated technology throughout the past decade.
NASA, for example, had to scour eBay in 2002 to find 8086 chips that were designed to be used with Intel’s first personal computer, circa 1981. The Space Agers needed the chips to test the booster rockets for their shuttle program before it was retired in 2011. When concerned with safely launching something into space, it’s totally reasonable to use the oldest technology you can get your hands on, right?
Then there’s the fact that, up until 2010, the Secret Service’s computer systems were only operational about 60% of the time, thanks to a highly outdated 1980s mainframe. When Senator Joe Lieberman spoke out on the issue back in 2010, he claimed that, in comparison, “industry and government standards are around 98 percent generally.” It’s alright though, protecting the president and vice president is a job that’s really only important about 60 percent of the time, right?
Or it could be that government officials are just suckers for nostalgia.
If they want to avoid reliving situations like the FBI’s inability to access data in an iPhone for several months during the high-profile and high-stakes case of the San Bernardino shooters, however, they may want to spend more of that $80 million annual IT budget on advancements instead of pouring a majority of funds into preserving the past.
The Pentagon says that the nuclear command and control unit will cease the use of floppy disks by the end of 2017, with a full modernization of the system by 2020.
Nine countries currently possess nuclear weapons and global tension around such possession is rising constantly, but holding off another three to four years to update the system that coordinates operational functions of our nukes seems like a good idea, don’t you think?
